


So How'd You Do It?

by ayrangel1331



Category: Original Work
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, But it was still hard, FTM, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Identity, Genderfluid, Hallucinations, Hospitalization, I am depressed as I write this, I needed to write this, Mental Health Issues, Names have been changed, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Read at Your Own Risk, Slow To Update, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Trans Male Character, Transgender, my story, this is how I remember it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:33:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21606847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ayrangel1331/pseuds/ayrangel1331
Summary: This is a fictionalization of my own story. The names of the people involved have been changed and some characters are combinations of real people. I had to get it out and I figured why not put it somewhere it may help someone else. I don't expect it to be read though. I don't know how long it will be or where in my story it will end. I was going to put something about how you're not alone and to always seek help blah blah blah, but in the end that's up to you. I'm right there in the pit with you right now, thus the story. But maybe just stick it out to the end of this story, whenever that may be. I promise I will too.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	1. Devin

“So how’d you do it?” A voice asked. I looked up, straight into a face that was much younger than the eyes peering out of it. Those eyes… they knew exactly why I was here though I hadn’t said a word to anyone for the last three days. I didn’t have any visible marks either, so it wasn’t like it was obvious. I raised an eyebrow. Did they expect me to talk?  
“Just nod when I get it right. Knife? Drugs? Pills?” I nodded at the third. What was the point of hiding it? “Sleeping, pain, or psychotropic?” I held up one finger, indicating the first option. They nodded. I couldn’t get a finger on their age, their gender even.  
“Devin. You’re Carter.” They said and I nodded once, acknowledging the introduction. I was getting restless, yet my exhaustion kept me firmly seated. Pacing was too much work, no matter how much relief it would offer from the static electricity in my veins. They sat down across from me, gesturing to my notebook, laid open in front of me with doodles in the margins. The center was blank and clean. The odd, bendable pen I’d been using flicked back and forth in my fingers, the only outward sign of the nervous tingling under my skin.  
“Why’d you do it?” Devin asks and I blink slowly at them, my eyes deadpan. Everyone around here knew I wasn’t going to talk, Devin obviously among them. When the other continued to just stare expectantly, I rolled my eyes, preparing to stand. Devin caught my wrist and I flinched harshly, yanking my hand back. Devin held up both hands, palms out, clearly a gesture of surrender.  
“Sorry, don’t leave. You don’t have to talk.” They said and, hesitantly, I sat again. Anxiety had pushed the fatigue away for now and my knees bounced rhythmically, shoulders hunched and hands twisted around each other with the pen trapped in the middle. Devin sighed, slouching back in the uncomfortable plastic chair, until it tipped back slightly. They were playing with fire. The nurse on duty in the evening hated the chairs having any less than all four feet on the ground. Speaking of which, she should be bringing dinner any minute now.  
It suddenly occurred to me that the reason Devin was sitting with me was because there were no other places to sit. This close to the holiday, all the patients here had as many visitors as were allowed and every chair, couch, and bench was taken up by parents and spouses and siblings and friends. Everyone except for Devin and I had at least one person to hold hands and talk quietly and offer clean clothes and new books. I didn’t care. I’d added the only two people who knew about my hospitalization to the ‘do not allow’ list, a designation I’d catch hell for when I eventually got out. I dismissed that train of thought before it even started moving. Getting out of here wasn’t on my list of goals for the moment. I needed the time to myself desperately.  
“Do you celebrate Christmas?” Devin asked, out of the blue. I blinked at them, considering how to answer. Finally I waved a hand in a sort of ‘so-so’ movement. I didn’t; my family celebrated the birth of their god and I celebrated family time and tried to stay out of the religious aspect as much as possible. The music was pretty at least.  
“I don’t celebrate anything, not even my birthday.” Devin said, in a falsely superior way that told me that they either did celebrate and it was bittersweet or that they didn’t celebrate but wished they could. I raised a skeptical eyebrow at them as they glanced my way from staring out the window and they sighed.  
“My mom does but I just can’t seem to get into the spirit. Anyways, I hate my birthday. I wish they’d stop making such a big fuss out of it.” This conversation was growing tiresome. I stood up again, tense in case they tried to grab me again but they let me go, lost in thought. I went to my tiny cell of a room, closed the blinds entirely to shut out the last rays of the setting, orange sun, and flopped onto the hard bed. My face buried into the pillow, tilted just so to allow me to breathe. Darkness and quiet, that’s what I needed. Or at least, as quiet as it got in this place. Cart wheels squeaked, machines beeped, doors opened and closed as overly cheery nurses came in ‘just to check, dearie’. One would be arriving at my room shortly and I listened.  
Jodie peered her head in after about five minutes and I peeked out and waved to her. That should leave me half an hour before they came again. It should be fifteen minutes but the ward was surprisingly busy for three days before Christmas. It was rather a disappointment really. It’s much easier to be depressed and lonely when there’s no one around, or so you’d think. Really it just makes it easier to answer the questions they ask. “All these people, I’m sure you can find someone you click with.” Crowds are anonymous, something a lot of mental health providers forget.  
The noise in the hallway swelled as families left and food arrived simultaneously. I wait for it to start to die down, till the nurses’ shoes start to come down the hall towards my room and others to get up and walk out into the hall, taking my tray in the day room and sitting back at the unwanted corner table. At least, unwanted until Devin insisted on sitting across from me again. In the crowded room, I’m sure they didn’t really have a choice if they wanted a chair. Still, it annoyed me somewhat distantly.  
“Strawberry shortcake huh?” They gestured with their chin and I nodded absently. Maybe they would stop asking me questions if I stopped giving them real answers. My head was pounding, a side effect of putting off the sleep side effect of these new meds they had me on. I really didn’t have the energy to deal with this persistent of a person right now. I ate as little of the food as they’d let me get away with without questions and turned in my tray, heading back to my room. Group wasn’t until nine. I had some time.  
In the quiet dark of my own personal space, I showered in the lukewarm water as it sprayed out in three minute bursts. I dressed in the too big clothes the hospital’s lost and found provided and went to sit at my desk in the oddly shaped, teal, plastic chair. It was surprisingly comfortable. I knew I should work on the little workbook they called a ‘discharge planner’. It was, as the name implied, a plan of what to do once you were discharged so you never had to come back. It listed resources, phone numbers, and places to go for help. It asked questions like ‘what are your strengths?’ and ‘what do you enjoy?’. It terrified me because once it was done to their satisfaction, I would have to leave.  
I didn’t want to leave. Besides the skull melting boredom, this place was everything I needed right now: an inside out snow globe with big windows looking out at a tiny, moving world from the fifth floor of the hospital on the hill. A relatively quiet, totally encapsulated world with keycard access doors and delivered food that was better than anything I’d ever expected from hospital food. I didn’t want to go back out in a world that spun and shuddered and blinked like a strobe light. It was too much noise, too much movement. I needed silent and still.  
I missed my music though. They wouldn’t let me have my headphones and phone to listen to my music, not even for a few minutes at the nurses station. I craved it like an addict craves their drug of choice. I almost hummed a few bars of the selection currently playing in my head, but I can’t make my throat create sound so easily after three days of silence. Instead I push the discharge planner aside and grab for my ever present, already slightly worn composition notebook. I turn to the next available page, the one with doodles all along the sides and nothing in the middle. Somewhere I find room for more geometric scribbles without touching the pristine paper between the two vertical lines. I’m just not ready to fill it yet. I don’t know what I’ll fill it with, but it feels wrong to fill it in so I don’t. Nothing my mind says makes much sense these days but I don’t fight it anymore. What’s the point? The world already knows I’m crazy. Why not give in and act the part?  
Suddenly there was someone in my doorway and I startled badly. I’d had my light down as low as I could and still see to doodle but now they’re turned up bright and I threw my arms over my face. A nurse with a blood draw kit walks briskly over to me and proceeds to take my arm, turning it to face palm upwards and tying the tourniquet. I can’t even ask her what she’s doing, because the anxiety of her waltzing in and taking charge has sealed off my throat even more than before. She takes my blood, needle digging painfully under my skin when she doesn’t find the vein immediately, then leaves with a gruff, “Drink more water. I’ll send the results to Dr. Anderson.” Then she was gone and I blinked at the red adhesive bandage wrapped around my arm. Without it, I would have been sure she’d been just another hallucination.  
Hallucination...right. I got up as quickly as I dared with my too loose joints and my too long limbs and dimmed the light again, glancing sidelong at the corner the light never quite reached, no matter how bright. He was still there, mandibles dripping, skin stretched over knobby joints too big to fit under it. His eyes were many and black and I hated him, the constant shivering in my bones beginning again to escalate to something far more likely to shake me apart at the seams.  
Go away. I mouthed at him, but he just hissed and clicked those hideous sideways jaws together a few times. I needed more medicine. That would knock me out and keep him from tormenting me, but they couldn’t give me more till after group. I could always flee to the dayroom so there were witnesses if he tried anything. In my head, I knew he was just a side effect of the massive overdose I’d given myself and he’d disappear once my brain chemistry reset, but he just looked so real…  
I went back to the bed and slid under the covers. They’d come wake me for group in an hour or so. No one got to skip it unless they were with a doctor at the time. I just needed to shut out the monster for a while. If I didn’t think about him, he seemed to disappear a bit. I was drifting as soon as the blankets settled around my body, the cool air blowing against my fabric barrier and turning the whole thing into a sheet of ice, pressing my paralyzed body to the bed. I was too tired to be afraid or uncomfortable. This was just how it was.  
I didn’t remember the dreams when I awoke to the firm voice of the best nurse in the place, a tall and strapping young man with kind, lively eyes and a voice that should have melted me like white chocolate. It only didn’t because I wasn’t made of chocolate anymore. I just knew I was floating on an unstable cloud of nausea and swimming light and that I couldn’t remember exactly where I was. I did remember I wasn’t talking though and that kept my mouth shut as I stumbled out of bed and followed him back to the dayroom.  
We all sat in a circle in front of the dark tv, chatting until the nurses pulled in the last stragglers. I looked out the window and ignored it all, allowing my head to float away on that cloud I’d barely been holding down. Voices hummed around me, rising and falling with no meaning attached.  
“Carter, why don’t you tell us what your plan is for getting ready to leave tomorrow?” I whipped my head around so fast that I had to grab at my head to make sure it didn’t fly off. Nausea spilled through me like someone in my gut tipped over a cup of acid. My eyes must have been a little crazed because one of the medication nurses quietly broke off to go into the nurses station and get my meds.  
“Carter?” The male nurse asked. I suddenly had the thought that his name was either Tristan or Dakota. I tried to match the name with his eyes, which were the only thing I could see clearly through the haze in my vision.  
“I can’t.” I croaked out, the words mumbled and tripping over each other. “I can’t leave tomorrow. I can’t.” I was hyperventilating, my chest burning with it even though the sounds of my breaths weren’t reaching my ears. Someone touched me and I threw myself off the chair to get away, stumbling and barely making it to my feet. I looked around at the sea of shocked faces, all wide eyes and half-open, whispering mouths. For the first time in my life, I felt truly and completely insane. I ran for it, skidding around the corner and down the hall to my room. Closing the door was futile with no lock but I did it anyway, then threw myself into the bathroom with a padded door and the doorless shower.  
No one came for me. Not for a long time.  
I didn’t cry. I was shaking too much to cry. I just huddled in the still damp corner of the shower, shivering and sniffling so that the sound of my breaths echoed far too loud in my already oversensitive ears. I was hoping that no one would come, praying that I’d be alone until I could face myself and the rest of the ward again. At the same time though, the emptiness gnawed at me, chipping away at my energy to become bigger, darker, hungrier. I couldn’t bear it. I didn’t want to live anymore. This was the huge, empty, noisy darkness that had me swallowing handfuls of pills in a parked car in the middle of a blizzard in the first place.  
They almost hadn’t found me, the hissing spider-demon in the corner reminds me. They almost hadn’t known which farmer’s field on the edge of the Reservation to look in, much less which tiny off-road track to follow over the ditch and the small hills to find my beat up car. There was already six inches of snow on the ground and more falling by the second. They’d called in an off-duty officer who knew the area to pore over maps with them to find me while the 911 operator relayed my garbled, delirious instructions.  
I was only alive because that man, who I had no name or face for, decided to answer his phone. I didn’t know whether to curse or praise him. I had the names of the two cops who had come, who had stayed with me, written down on the first page of my notebook, so I couldn’t forget: Sergeant Fullmer and Officer Brown, no first names given. Again I was distracted from my misery by this tug-of-war about whether to be angry or grateful for their aid. Maybe someday things would be clearer, if there was a ‘someday’ for me.  
Eventually, I stood, slowly stretching every aching muscle and moving to the bed. Almost like she’d been summoned, the Filipino nurse who had checked me in three nights ago came in, two paper cups in hand. Water and pills, just what every batshit crazy person needs after having a total freak out in the middle of group counseling. I gulped down the contents of both cups in record time.  
The nurse, who I guess went by Shauna, didn’t make me go back. She just smiled at me and took the cups away, leaving me alone again. I collapsed into bed, covering my head with the pillow so my face lay against the cool sheet. When would this all end?


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: suicide attempt, overdose, near death experience, ambulances, the whole shebang.

Three meals a day with actual calories in them was starting to make me gain weight but in this case it was a good thing. I had never been particularly low weight, but I felt a little life come back into me when I wasn’t dizzy and weak with hunger. It almost made up for the unending shakiness and fluttering heart that stemmed from my overdose.   
I was having nightmares though. Flashbacks to being in my car while hallucinations swam around me and the suicide hotline woman chirped in my ear, reassuring me that they would find me, that the cop who knew where I might be was on his way.   
I remembered every second of that night, from the time I set up my excuses to the moment I fell asleep in the fifth floor behavioral health unit.   
It started like this: I often took myself to movies for a little time off with a Marvel movie or a Mission Impossible flick, whatever action movie sounded exciting that month. So I looked up one happening the same day as a manager meeting at my Burger King job and casually mentioned to my parents that I wouldn’t be home till late because I was going to it. Then, I downloaded a Gmail extension that allowed me to setup and email to go out at a time I set and wrote my suicide note. Something simple about not hating themselves, about placing all their hate on me instead. I added personal notes to the bottom of every generic email I prepared, so everyone who really mattered would know I cared about them, even if they didn’t care about me. That done, I felt a certain peace. I knew this was the right choice because I felt better than I had in months.   
It was easy after that. Go to the meeting. Smile and participate as normal. Go buy a bottle of over-the-counter sleeping pills. Smile and thank the cashier on my way out. Drive out toward the reservation, noting each road with the clarity I’d been missing for so long as I turned down a small road. I didn’t even feel anxiety as I realized there was a house at the end of it, simply pulling a U-turn and getting back on the road.   
Finally I found a dirt path heading over a small hill and then across a small bridge to the middle of a snow covered field. No one could see me from the road. Perfect.   
The middle went something like this: I opened the bottle and was mildly surprised to see how small the pills were. Easier to take I suppose. There were sixty in the bottle. I had two large water bottles in the car with me from a previous road trip. I counted out twelve pills in my hand and took them easily. I waited a half hour, listening to an audiobook recording of Eldest by Christopher Paolini, then took another twelve. I waited fifteen drowsy minutes and took another twelve. My limbs were growing pleasantly warm and heavy, my eyes blinking more and more slowly, but my mind didn’t feel sleepy, just calm and resigned. There were worse ways to go out.  
Snow began to fall from a gray sky. I opened my sunroof cover and leaned back my chair as far as it would go so I could watch the snowflakes fall against the glass. They landed and melted, landed and melted, trickling and pooling in the corners of the window until they ran over the edges and down the windows. The windows themselves fogged over more and more as the snow fell more and more thickly.   
Without thinking, I messaged a mostly unintelligible “Hi how are you?” to my friend Lir, who called me back almost immediately.   
“Carter? What’s going on?” She said, a bit hesitantly.   
“Nothing.” I slurred. “Everything is… totally fine...finally.” If she could have seen the dopey smile on my face, she would have been even more concerned.   
“Carter, what did you do?” There was fear in that voice, and just a touch of anger. I could hear the tap-tap-tapping of Lir texting someone while she listened to me on speaker.   
“Who’re you texting?” I murmured.   
“Rae. She’s going to track your phone if you don’t tell me: What. Did. You. Do?” The typically laid back and almost childish girl was so serious her voice had dropped nearly an octave. I blinked slowly, the smile melting from my face in slow motion.   
“I...took a bunch of sleeping pills. Thirty-six.” I said, unable to lie under the influence. There was a deathly silent pause, then the tapping increased in volume and velocity.  
“Call 911 now.” She said. “You’re going to die.” I laughed crazily.   
“That’s the idea.”   
“Call now or Rae is calling them for you.” I rolled my eyes, a long, lazy motion that almost rolled my head around more than my eyes.   
“You two don’t know where I am.” Lir paused again, and this time the tapping didn’t resume right away.   
“Then tell me.” Lir said, but a lot of the steel had left her voice, like she’d just realized how little power she had over what happened to me now. “Or call the suicide hotline. Tell me you’ll at least call them and tell them what happened.” I didn’t think about it very long before I figured, why the hell not?  
“Yeah I will, but I have to hang up with you to do that. Text me the number. I don’t wanna look it up.” Then I hung up.   
A text came in seconds later, and I highlighted the number on the screen, then hit the green button to call out. I waited a few minutes as the hotline found someone to talk to me. Finally, a young-sounding woman who identified herself as Joy asked who she was speaking to.   
“Carter.” I said, the word coming out much less slurred than a minute ago. I wondered if I should take another handful of pills, but felt too lazy to sit up and do so.   
“Okay Carter, what’s going on tonight?” Joy asked. I giggled softly.   
“I’m dying.” I said, realizing that at some point that my toes had gone numb. It wasn’t frightening, just a fact.   
“Carter, can you explain further?” Joy said and the concern in her voice jolted something in me. I frowned.   
“I took a lot of pills. My toes are numb.” I said, voice a little distant. My heart fluttered, too quick for my slow, slow body. Shadows were creeping about at the corners of my vision and somehow, I couldn’t attribute them all to the approaching night.   
“Okay Carter, have you called 911?” She asked, voice still mostly calm, but I could hear the undertone of fear. It triggered my heart to beat even faster, the shadows starting to take form. I struggled to sit my seat up but only made it partway with arms that felt like wet noodles.   
“No. I need to pee.” And it was true, though I hadn’t realized it consciously until that very moment. The urgency to not piss in my car gave me a little strength. Ignoring Joy’s suggestion that I keep the car doors closed to stay warm, I opened the door and stumbled out into a foot of snow to do my business. I almost fell more than sat down in the car and closed the door after a few tries, shivering slightly.   
“Carter, are you okay?” I’d left my phone in the car. I flopped back in the seat and put it up to my ear again.   
“I’m here.” I said, a little breathless from the exertion and the fact that I couldn’t draw a full breath, my lungs too tired.   
“Carter, I need you to call 911.” Joy said, urgency now poisoning her voice on top of the fear.   
“Why?”   
“Because there’s a lot of people that will miss you if you die right now.” I laughed bitterly.  
“They’ll get over it.” I said, waving a floppy hand as though I could wipe the concern away in advance.   
“No, they won’t.” It was the lack of any type of false cheeriness in Joy’s voice that shook me out of my self-deprecation. “They won’t trust me. Suicide makes a wave and it rarely creates only one casualty. So I need you to call 911.”  
So I did, and they got the cop whose day off it was in to figure out my garble and increasingly confused directions as the dark and blizzard raced to overtake me first. As I waited, I noticed the demon behind me, eyeing the soft skin of my throat with sharp, horizontal jaws. The pair of cops that arrived held him at bay somehow.   
The end came through like this: an ambulance came. I wasn’t strong enough to get into the ambulance by myself as my legs gave out from under me, so the EMT helped hold me up and got me on the gurney. The ambulance was distinctly larger inside than I thought. Sergeant Fullmer got into the ambulance with me, strapping himself in on my left as the EMT hooked me up to an IV of fluids and strapped me to the bed. I might have been talking, and if so, I don’t know what I said. The ceiling was moving, swimming, a portal for whatever my mind thought should come through. They kept telling me not to sleep, but I didn’t remember my eyes closing.   
Then we went into a short tunnel, they pulled my gurney out, they took me to a triage room with a curtain and six huge cabinets full of scary medications and syringes and tools. I couldn’t stop looking, and then my parents ducked through the curtain and I thought I would be sick. They didn’t say a word. I didn’t say anything either. They just watched the fluids go in, bag after bag after bag, stepped out when a nurse came in to put me on the bedside toilet pan, came back and used curt reminders to keep my sagging eyes from closing for long. The cop from before called them out in the middle somewhere and told my parents what had happened from his point of view and that I was special or some such garbage. My mind was starting to come back online.   
Finally, they decided I was out of the woods and asked if I would voluntarily admit myself to the 5th floor Behavioural Health Unit. I knew what they wanted and frankly, I thought I deserved it.  
And now that story had come full circle, but I was still here and they were signing my papers and packing my things and telling me it was time to go and my parents were on the other side of the door. I knew the day was coming but...  
Eventually they did have to discharge me, I guess.   
“It’s Christmas!” The social worker unnecessarily reminded me. “Go enjoy time with your family. Open some presents, listen to some music, play in the snow. It’ll be good for you.” I sighed, gathering my plastic bag of belongings and heading out to the dayroom where my dad was waiting for me. He smiled, but I could see the pity in his eyes. It made me sick, not because of any pride on my part, but entirely due to guilt. He looked awful, as sleep deprived and fragile as I felt. We exchanged small talk I didn’t remember by the time it was over and drove home.   
My siblings greeted me at the door. The divide was clear between those who knew what had happened and those who didn’t. The two older ones had red eyes and sad smiles, the younger two were only curious.  
“Why were you in the hospital?” Josh asked, pulling my hand into the living room to show me the presents under the tree, spilling out behind the chairs on either side of it.   
“I was sick.” I replied simply. “I’m better now.” A lie of course, but my family needed to hear it. I even managed what I hoped was a convincing smile. Judging by my stepmom’s shoulders relaxing, it was. Only my sister, Peyton, seemed to distrust that statement. I could see it in the set of her jaw.   
“Will you stay up and play games with us tonight?” Angie asked, and I realized that it was Christmas Eve. We always stayed up late in the basement, playing games and watching movies and eating junk food until we passed out in our sleeping bags. It made sure the parents had enough time to set up presents and stockings without having to stay up later than us. Suddenly I remembered I’d been asked a question and smiled again.   
“Of course I will. It’s Christmas Eve and a tradition.” I said and Aaron whooped with excitement. My parents had retreated to the kitchen, close enough to keep an ear out for us, but not close enough for us to hear their whispered conversation. I knew it was about me.   
I chattered with my family for a while, then retreated to my room, plastic bag in hand. I had my phone hidden in the depths of the bag along with my headphones. I didn’t know how long I had before they realized I had it in my room, which was against the rules of the house. I would give it half an hour so they would think I was just unpacking, then hide the bag and take the phone out. It would give me a little time to set up the Bluetooth so I could listen to my tunes from across the house.   
I played with the settings for a while, slipping the buds into my ears for a quick test before taking the device out into the kitchen and plugging it in. No one even noticed, as per usual. It appeared not even trying to kill myself could break through the habit of just pushing me to the background. The only time I got attention was when I was in trouble. It would have made for an explosive situation when I was younger but now I was too tired and beaten down to fight, especially when it lost me screen time privileges. I had to have my one outlet, my one connection to the outside world where people actually cared about the real me, the one who questioned and doubted and yearned.   
I ended up falling asleep to Linkin Park in my right ear, dreaming as always of the things that made my heart ache when I woke up: love and acceptance and happiness in the form of a small family and caring spouse. I could never put another family through dealing with me though and I didn’t see myself getting better anytime soon. Besides, eighteen should be too early to think about a spouse and family, right?   
I woke up with a start when my dad knocked on my door, pressing the pause button on my headphones so I could hear him tell me it was time for dinner. My stomach flip flopped. I didn’t want to eat, but it was necessary if I wanted to keep up the facade that everything was fine now, that I was fine now. I got up and followed Dad to the table, bowing my head for the prayer and starting up the exhausting process of keeping up appearances. Not only did I have to laugh at the right times and smile pretty much the whole time, but I had to resist the urge to flinch every time someone brushed up against me. My skin was still electric and everything was just too much.   
“So, Becca, did you prepare your part for tonight’s candlelight devotional while you were in your room?” I froze. I’d completely forgotten. I was supposed to speak about Mother Mary and her part in Christ’s birth. I look down at my plate for a split second to collect my thoughts. I decide on the truth.   
“I fell asleep.” I said quietly, hoping the exhaustion seeped through a bit without giving too much away. My dad and stepmom exchange looks across the table and I know I’m going to get away with it the second my dad sighs.   
“Try to get it done after dinner. I’ll do your dishes for you.” He says and I smile, thanking him while my heart pounds painfully against my ribs. I didn’t believe in this shit anymore but I had to play the part. Luckily I could hide out at the local McDonalds on Sunday afternoons when I was supposed to be at the young adult group of church. The moment they found out about that, I was sure I would be kicked out, or at least threatened with it.   
Survival tactics, right? The irony.


End file.
